The Guardian reviewed Carlos Spottorno’s new work Wealth Management and claimed “…that there is enough mischief here to prove that Carlos Spottorno is one of the most serious political provocateurs currently operating in photography.” There is no doubt that Spottorno is a very smart photographer, but I disagree with the thought that this work is anything provocative. Unlike previous efforts, such as his project PIGS, this one falls within the same confines of the predictable and unimaginative.

The fact of the matter is that it has now become quite banal to document the profligate life-styles of the super-rich. In fact, Lauren Greenfield was an early pioneer of documenting the bizarre and deviant priorities and interests of the American elite society. However, since the 2008 crash, there have been a whole host of works that try to speak about global inequality and do so from the perspective of the hyper-wealthy. In fact, there are so many works that Time Magazine’s associate Photo Editor Myles Little could put together a massive global exhibition of works that bring together a visual potpourri of the lives of the super-rich.

More and more, I’m seeing wealth and power — in specific photo stories, and even more so, in the increasingly random presentation of news photos — as not just a recurrent theme, but as connective tissue….If hyper-capitalism is becoming the issue of our time, however, I’m tempted also say that more and more images…are presenting a moral counterweight. Details »

I did find this discomforting…its only the trailer, but the associations and presumptions are a offensive combination of Orientalism / Historical revisionism. Indeed, as someone pointed out, they are fantastic musicians, but this fact is entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand i.e the appropriation of Western symbols of liberation and freedom, juxtaposed against highly curtailed and crafted ideas of ‘religious’ fundamentalism and barbarism. We have seen this very often, and as well made as this film is, and as well crafted the narrative, it really doesn’t seem to want to get past this dichotomy, and to find a way to convince the international movie-going circuit that there is a longing to be more like them, and a desire to speak more like they do. And in that process, all sorts of liberties have been taken to construct the freedom vs. barbarism narrative. Details »

There is a uncomfortable relationship between winning awards and doing journalism. Or photojournalism. Personally, I find it odd that reporters and photographers are so keen to ‘pick up’ awards, to walk down red-carpets, to accept trinkets that are apparently there to mark their ‘achievements’. It begs the question: what is the journalist’s or photojournalist’s achievement? How does one measure that in fact? Well, clearly in photojournalism, the achievement is always merely aesthetic. The works are never measured for their political, social, cultural or intellectual impact. Never. We are merely happy to pick up awards because the pictures were nice. Its all quite insular, self-congratulatory, and in complete contradiction of the public rhetoric of the craft, and the moral grandstanding that so many writers and photographers spew in social media and interviews. Details »

The theatre of democracy keeps falling apart. What we are witnessing is the ideology of neoliberalism that is now so deeply entrenched in the EU member states that an entire political idea – people centred democracy – that Europe once claimed was ‘its heritage’ is being jettisoned. We saw how the voice of the people of Greece was never even a consideration in the way the Troika dealt with that crisis, we see it here the constitution is effectively discarded to protect the arrangements of the EU itself, and we will see it again elsewhere. This is however, not just about ideology. It is also about faith in a system called Ordoliberalism – a German concoction that emerged in the aftermath of WWII, where it is believed by its adherents that:

…like the Anglo-Saxon advocates of laissez-faire, believe the state should not distort the workings of the markets, but they also believe that free competition does not develop spontaneously. The state should establish a legal, technical, social, moral and cultural framework for the markets, and make sure everyone follows the rules….They argued that a strong state was needed to neutralise cartels and avoid the escalation of economic war. Eucken wrote: “The state has to consciously shape the structures, the institutional framework, the order, in which the economy functions … But it [should] not direct the economic process itself.